"Thank God!" he said quite simply, as he read the message to his wife.
Next morning early, Brenton went to them again. He found them taking
breakfast with good appetite, while they made an infinite variety of
plans for the home-coming of the invalid. There had been two more
telegrams, the previous evening, and a night letter had followed them.
To Brenton, however, the particulars seemed glorious rather than
reassuring. Instead of the fire stirred with a stick of dynamite, there
had been something infinitely more deadly. A careless blast, set off by
an inexperienced miner, had brought down a fall of rock where it had
been least expected. A dozen men had been injured, and some of the
shoring had been loosened, imperilling the lives of many more. No
reasonably sane consulting engineer, however conscientious, could have
imagined it his duty to lead the work of rescue. Measured by the value
to the corporation, his one brain was worth a dozen score of miners'
lives. Nevertheless, Reed Opdyke had not viewed the matter in that
light. He was alert and strong, trained to face every possible
emergency known underground. Moreover, he knew better than any other
man the conditions likely to be existent in the dismantled vein.
Therefore it was Reed Opdyke who had led the first of the rescue
parties.
Quite as a matter of course, he had made his way directly to the
injured men, had helped to carry them back safely to the main shaft.
Providence always looks out for little things like that. It uses its
tools before it blunts them. Then Opdyke had gone back again into the
vein, to see if he could make up his mind, at a superficial glance,
concerning the extent of the damage and the best chances for repairing
it. It was then that he found one more miner, wedged between the
loosened timbers of the shoring. At best, minutes were ahead of him,
not hours. At best, the danger in freeing him was almost infinite. None
the less, while other men faltered and drew back, afraid, Opdyke had
sent an ax crashing into the weakened timbers.
All this was told to the professor briefly. The rest of the message was
couched in terms so surgical as to convey scant meaning to Scott
Brenton's brain. At the very end, there were two dates, both only
possible, both so remote as to turn Brenton sick at heart. Was it for
this that such men as Reed Opdyke were created? Was nature merciless,
was law, that it ordained such pitiful, pitiless waste?
It was with these questions ringing in his brain, then, that Scott
Brenton, after his old fashion, shut his teeth askew and awaited the
still distant homecoming of his old-time idol. He gained the slimmest
sort of comfort by remembering how characteristic it all was of the boy
he used to know.